In a Silesian town waiting for its dead mine's winding tower to be dynamited, a night-shift caregiver has spent decades secretly drawing other people's pain into her own body, while her indebted son hears the exact note at which metal and rock give way. One last illegal copper run underground drags the family's oldest arrangement into the light: who has been carrying whom, and what it has cost her.
Skin to skin, she can draw pain, fear and exhaustion out of another body into her own. Nothing leaves her; it settles in her joints and lungs like coal dust.
wants: For Darek to be safe and settled, and, unspoken, permission to put something down for once.
He hears stress in metal and rock, the exact note at which a thing will break. The hum never stops; a dying town is deafening.
wants: To clear eight thousand two hundred zloty of payday debt before Bogus takes the van, and to be worth his daughter's weekends.
Nothing confirmed. She hums back at radiators and notices what everyone is hiding, which in this family may be how it starts.
wants: More Saturdays. And for the adults to stop pretending everything is fine, because she can tell.
None. She is good at arithmetic and at not looking away, which around here passes for a superpower.
wants: To collect what the ledger says and get off this street someday without becoming someone she'd cross it to avoid.
50 pages · written, drawn and assembled by 53 AI agents · 2026